I first heard the Sex Pistols in mid-1978, a full year
after “God Save the Queen” convulsed the United Kingdom in the summer of ’77.
Living in a small English town far from the action, my 14-year-old head was
elsewhere all through ‘77, sideways glimpsing punk’s existence only in photo
spreads of outrageous haircuts in Sunday newspaper magazines. When I finally
heard Never Mind the Bollocks, the Pistols story affected me as a
rock-myth fait accompli, rather than unfolding as a real-time historical
sequence with an uncertain outcome.

It was my brother Tim—a few years younger, far better
endowed in street cred because he went to a state school—who brought home a
cassette of songs by the Pistols and Ian Dury & The Blockheads and who later
bought Bollocks. Because I wasn’t going to gigs yet, or reading the
music press, and only rarely seeing groups like these on TV, punk’s power
manifested itself to me almost entirely as sheer sonic force: I’d never heard
anything so domineering, never even imagined that “pop” could be this
unbridled, such an attack.

The record covers were thrilling too, thanks to punk’s
aggressively innovative graphic language (Bollocks’s ransom-note newsprint
lettering, for instance). When the
Pistols’ The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle came out in 1979, me and Tim and our younger
brother Jez pored over the double album’s gatefold sleeve with its stills from the forthcoming movie (then still a long
way from completion and release). But most of all, it was the voices in punk, a
kind never heard before in pop: tones of jubilant bitterness; a sense of
malevolent power conjured up from with the singer’s body through sheer will and
blasted out at the listener. The voice, above all of Johnny Rotten. That, and the
things he sang about. Like anarchy, an intoxicating and unfamiliar concept.

It’s moot whether “Anarchy in the U.K.” should be taken
as a Political Statement; it’s more like prophecy or poetry. If the song
corresponds to any ideology, the closest thing is the 19th century stripe of
anarchism associated with German
philosopher Max Stirner, who imagined the state being dissolved in favor
of a “union of egoists.” Anarchy,
in this worldview,means
absolute sovereignty for each individual, who would no longer be subject to
higher authority or constraints to the free exercise of desire. Anarchism, in
other words, that has nothing to do with the placid, orderly decision-making of
communes or workers’ councils; rather, it’s an apocalyptic unleashing, a chaos of wills, with each individual ruling
his or her life like a tyrant.That’s
how I hear the chorus “I wanna be/Anarchy,” which Rotten drags out like a
triumphant jeer.

As a vision for how society should organize itself,
“Anarchy in the U.K.” is literally puerile, the sort of thoughts entertained by
adolescents with no inkling of how challenging life is. But I was 15 when I
heard the song, just the right age. The Pistols spoke most intoxicatingly to
boys between 13 and 17: a period in life when you have an innate flair for
recklessness, an awesome ability to disregard consequences. Boredom—and
something darker too, an appetite for destruction—drove the brothers Reynolds
and our peers towards vandalism, risk-taking (“dares”), and pranks. It’s the nastiness
of punk—the “I wanna destroy” side, the (Sid) Vicious-ness—that gets written
out of the validating histories, which invariably accentuate punk’s idealism,
the empowering and constructive do-it-yourself ideas. But in our suburban
bedroom, we thrilled to the tales of the Pistols puking at airports, Sid
slashing his chest onstage, and the seductively cynical notion that it had
always been a swindle, a Malcolm McLaren cash-from-chaos masterplan.

Age 20 when he recorded “Anarchy,” Rotten was already a
bit old for this kind of thing—and in truth, he wasn’t a “Smash It Up” punk at
heart, but a book-reading, record-collecting hipster who shrank from real-life
violence. McLaren, at 30, should have
been well past this way of thinking. But the Pistols manager idealized,
venerated—and also envied—teenagers as the only really revolutionary class.
Existing in a liminal limbo between childhood and duty-bound adulthood,
emboldened by the dawning sense of their own physical and mental independence,
the Kids were the only ones who could ever change things, because they had no stakes
in the status quo.

Where “Anarchy” is timeless Gnostic-Romantic poetry, “God
Save the Queen” diminishes itself slightly by being topical, as well as having
the shape of a Classic Rock Anthem. The historical peg was the Royal Jubilee celebration
of Queen Elizabeth’s 25 years on the throne, “a mad parade” of imperial
nostalgia that covered every town in Britain with bunting and Union Jacks. The
Pistols’ single was such an affront – the lyric described the monarchy as a
“fascist regime” - the song led not just
to a BBC ban, but to enraged patriots
violently assaulting members of the band. Despite the embargo, the
single reached #2 on the UK chart; some believe that devious conniving by the
authorities kept “Anarchy” off the top spot to save further embarrassment to
the Establishment.

The scandal of “God Save the Queen” set up impossible
expectations for what politics in pop could achieve. It restored a belief in
rock’s power to incite and to threaten that had waned steadily since the heyday
of the Stones and the Who. But it was “Anarchy in the U.K.”—and other Bollocks
songs like “Bodies”—a foaming fulmination, explosive with expletives, against
the horror of human biological existence—that set the true challenge for rock going forward: How to equal the
expressive force of a voice, and a sound, that felt so corrosive it would
surely shake the world? The Sex Pistols songs were rock’s equivalent to the
theses nailed by Luther on the Wittenberg
church door: They made a decisive break with the Old Wave, while also—like the
Reformation before it—opening the way for further schisms, the proliferation of
sects pursuing different ideas of what punk now meant and how that dramatically
revivified power should be deployed most righteously.

TOM ROBINSON BAND - Power In the
Darkness, TRB 2 (1978-9)

The only fan of Tom Robinson Band I ever knew was a boy
in my lower-sixth class (equivalent to the eleventh grade) called Sandbrook, who had daubed TRB’s clenched-fist
stencil-style logo onto his satchel. Although my own tastes already leaned
towards post punk groups like Public Image Ltd and the Slits, Sandbrook’s
passion for TRB and protest-oriented Ulster punks Stiff Little Fingers was
close enough for us to feel like we were on the same side, at a school where most boys were still
drawing perfectly executed Genesis, Yes, and Pink Floyd logos on the desks.
His satchel also bore the insignias for Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi
League, other indicators of simpatico values that stood out at a school where:
1) the Conservatives always won the mock elections; and 2) where the parents of
one of my friends could declare that the world should quit meddling in South
Africa’s affairs, because the system there worked well for everybody—and they
weren’t hounded out of polite society.

Talking of sides, one of TRB’s anthems was titled “Better
Decide Which Side You’re On.” Tom Robinson conceived of his band’s constituency
as a rainbow coalition of the disadvantaged and marginalized: the unemployed,
racial minorities, gays, squatters, feminists, drug users. In reality, TRB’s
following was largely composed of progressive-minded white middle-class youth,
very much in the mold of Robinson himself—a clean-cut, well-spoken, smiley chap
who came over as earnest, unthreatening, and “straight” (although actually
openly and vocally gay). Those who’d been energized by punk but wanted
something constructive and more clearly aligned in its Left allegiances rallied
to TRB’s banner.

Robinson’s approach to music was means-to-an-end: he
wanted to bring his message to as wide an audience as possible. Accordingly TRB’s rousing sound was rooted in
the Old Wave more than the New Wave, finding a stomping, if stiff-hipped,
groove midway between Free and Mott the Hoople. Well-played and cleanly
produced, the road song “2-4-6-8 Motorway” was commercial enough to crack the
Top 5. But the group’s single and album
covers were plastered with contacts for every imaginable pressure group and
activist organisation.

TRB were huge in 1978: Critics hailed them a positive
realization of punk’s promise, there was an hour-long TV documentary devoted to
the band, the tours took in ever larger concert halls. But almost instantly the
music press turned on them for “preaching to the converted” and for being too
straight in their angle of address (lyrically and musically). Reaching
the unconverted became a crucial concern going forward. But equally important
for those looking to both live up to and extend punk was the idea of
challenging and unsettling the converted. Musicians and critics began to
explore the idea that politics was not about the transmission and reception of
messages but the initiation of a thought-process. In the next stage, “Question
everything” and “personal politics” became key buzz concepts.

Crass, a collective of former hippies and new punks who
lived in a communal farm cottage called Dial House, took the “anarchy” in
“Anarchy In the U.K.” literally. Punk, for them, was about self-rule. Crass
opposed all forms of hierarchy: State, Army, Church. They brandished slogans
like “Fight War Not Wars. Destroy Power Not People” and “You can’t vote
anarchist, you can only be one.” Politics was “politricks” and a power game
(another black-flag slogan was “Whoever you vote for, the government wins”).
For Crass, the Left was just as bad as the Right: Stations’ “White Punks
On Hope” equated socialist violence and fascist violence as “just the same old
game.”

My brothers were Crass fans and one single they played a
great deal, “Bloody Revolutions,” picked up this theme, criticizing macho
hard-left militancy in much the same way that John Lennon, in The Beatles’
“Revolution,” jeered at dogma-indoctrinated radicals with their Chairman Mao
placards. At university in the early Eighties I encountered this divide within
the anarchist community itself: gentle hippie-ish types largely concerned with
getting their minds right (feminist consciousness raising groups for both women
and men) versus the hot-head street guerrilla types happy to leave the chicks
and the wimps to their navel-gazing and get down to serious business like
brick-hurling confrontations with the Pigs.

Although later their music got more sophisticated and
experimental, early on Crass treated sound as a mere delivery system for the
messages. That was one reason the British music press initially scorned the
group and the anarcho-punk movement they spawned; Crass were also accused of
puritanism and sloganeering.

Yet Crass had a mischievous side, a McLaren-like delight
in the publicity stunt as a form of subversive media theatre. Most famous of
their pranks was the Thatchergate hoax: a 1982 record purporting to be a telephone
conversation between the British Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan, during which
were revealed dirty secrets about the Falklands War and the President’s plan
for a showdown with the Soviets using Europe as the arena of conflict.
The intelligence services got in a right flap about it, with the U.S.
State Department initially identifying the record as a KGB ruse.

But the one that really tickled me was in 1981, when—in the guise of Creative
Recording and Sound Services, which acronyms as C.R.A.S.S.—they persuaded Loving,
a mushy romantic magazine aimed at young women, to run a special offer for the
free flexi-single “Our Wedding.” Sung by Joy De Vivre, the band’s second female singer, to the accompaniment of
strings, church organ and wedding bells, this supposed celebration of marriage
was really a sardonic poker-faced expose of matrimony as mutual bondage:
“Listen to those wedding bells/Say goodbye to other girls”; “Never look at
anyone/Must be all you see.” Hundreds wrote in for the flexi before the prank
was revealed in a newspaper article. Talking to NME in June 1981, the
band’s Penny Rimbaud railed at Loving-type magazines as “obscene and
despicable rags” peddling “teenage pornography” that “trivialized love and
relationships.” “Our Wedding” later
appeared on their 1981 No. 1 indie-chart album Penis Envy.

Virtually all of Crass singles and LPs topped the UK’s
independent releases chart: their following was huge, especially out in the
provinces where punk achieved its greatest and most lingering impact a few
years after the big cities like London and Manchester had moved on musically
and sartorially. You saw the Crass stencil all over the UK: on walls, on paving
stones, and on the leather jackets of the punx mooching in clutches around bus
shelters and the fountains outside town halls. For most of the fans—including
my brothers—Crass’s appeal was as much to do with the visuals as the rather
rudimentary sonics. The records came in elaborate packaging that folded out to
form posters featuring Gee Vaucher’s beautifully drawn photo-realist
counter-propaganda, dream-like tableaus in which Maggie Thatcher and Queen
Elizabeth were leather-clad punkettes, the Statue of Liberty had a Mohawk, and
Pope John Paul II wore a “Destroy” T-shirt.

GANG OF FOUR - Entertainment!,
“Why Theory?” (1979-81)

Aged 17, I believed two things
about Gang of Four—that their music was funky as hell and that if these songs
got on the radio and onto Top of the Pops, they would be subversively
consciousness-raising in a simple cause-and-effect way, at the point of contact
with the listener’s brain. Go4’s funk, though, is quite some distance
from Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall or Chic: not a release but a girding
of the loins for the struggle ahead, a stark and staunch sound clenched with
commitment. As for the lyrics, they are certainly a big step forward from the
soapbox screeds of Crass and Tom Robinson, designed to unpick the threads
of ideology that stitch together our sense of the world as “a natural fact” (a
line from “Why Theory?” on Go4’s 1981 album Solid Gold).

Still, each song is making a statement, which the
listener has to work to uncover. Go4 are not preaching to the converted;
they’re critiquing on behalf of the predisposed. For example, on the 1979 debut Entertainment!,
“Natural’s Not In It” can easily be deciphered as an analysis of the way
capitalism ensnares desire via advertising’s “coercion of the senses”;
“Contract” is clearly a structural diagram of marriage that reveals its
fault-lines and contradictions. “At Home He’s A Tourist,” Go4’s near-hit
single, is more opaque, ranging from commodified sexuality to bourgeois
culture-binging as a way of filling the void.

Gang of Four signed to EMI, the same label as TRB, for
similar reasons: To get their ideas across to a mass audience. They agonized
over whether to appear on Top of the Pops to perform “Tourist” to the show’s 10-million-plus viewers,
because the price of admittance was censoring the word “rubbers,” a slang term
for condoms, in a lyric. Torn between integrity and crossover, Gang of Four decided
to opt for the former and torpedoed the evangelising raison d’etre that had led
them to EMI in the first place. This
principled refusal alienated the record company and as the moment of potential
breakthrough passed, the group’s career never really recovered.

SCRITTI POLITTI - Peel Sessions EP, 4 A-Sides EP (1979)

Born out of the same Leeds art school scene, Scritti Politti took the next step forward from Go4. Catalysed by the Anarchy Tour of 1977, Scritti began as a straightforward punk group, The Against. But almost immediately, things got a lot less straightforward: punk’s negative drive (its against-ness) turned on itself, with the launch of a potentially interminable project of undermining one’s own ideological assumptions. From the start that made the Scritti sound far less staunch and stable than Go4’s: wracked with uncertainty (“Doubt Beat” is one song's title) to the point where the music feels on the brink of nervous collapse. In singer/lyricist Green Gartside we encounter a mind so sharp it lacerates itself, thought that ties itself up in immobilizing knots. “OPEC-Immac,” for instance, makes oblique connections between the cartel of oil producing nations and a beauty product, before dissolving into a lacuna of impotent confusion: “how much do you ever stand to know?” The word “stand” suggests both a limit to how much you are ever likely to understand the workings of the world, but also how much knowledge – how much disabused lucidity – can an individual bear before succumbing to despair. Inverting the Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s maxim, pessimism of the intellect defeats optimism of the will.

Aged seventeen I found Scritti Politti – whose name, taken from a collection of texts by Gramsci, translates roughly as “political writings” – genuinely enlightening. They introduced my young brain to a large, confounding idea: the notion that, rather than being a transparently useful tool for radical thought, language itself might be a mechanism of oppression. In “PAs”, it’s “the language” that “shuts down” in 1920s Italy and again in 1930s Germany – and that might yet collapse in a fascist U.K. of the coming Eighties. “Bibbly-O-Tek” argues that language, wrapped around clothing, creates fashion, which then creates money. In the song, phrases like “secondary pickets” and “Eastern Bloc” are recited in a pointed, withering tone, leaving the listener to work out the ideological freight with which they’re loaded. “Secondary” implies that workers in one unionized industry have no business striking in solidarity with workers from another (as with dockers cutting off the supply of imported coal to help miners during an industrial dispute); “Eastern Bloc,” as a menacing term for a Soviet Empire, obscures the fact that NATO nations are satellites too, a Western Bloc of vassal states twitching to the tune of a different superpower.

This disorienting - yet also darkly exhilarating - idea of language as the prison-house of consciousness was pursued not just in the songs but in the photocopied text wrapped around the Peel Sessions EP, pages from an imaginary book titled Scritto’s Republic. “The rules of a society are embodied in the rules of its language,” wrote its unidentified author (Green obviously, although Scritti liked to present as a collective to the world). “It is through common sense speech that we are reproached and directed.... Language pre-exists our entry into it and defines what is normal and represses that which will not or cannot be covered or developed by its framework.”

Green carried his “linguistic turn” through to Scritti’s next phase of pop crossover, with deconstructed love-songs like “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” (which vows to look behind “the strongest words in each belief”) and the huge UK hit single “The Word Girl.” But as with deconstruction in the academy, this abstruse close-work seems to have little to say about the world outside the text. Scritti’s domain became the politics of and inside pop, rather than bringing real-world politics into pop.

DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS - Searching For the Young
Rebels (1980)

Post punk hatched an ascetic streak latent in punk. Entertainment
for its own sake was escapist, a narcotic: music needed to carry a higher
purpose of consciousness-raising or critique.Sometimes accused of being didactic and dour, groups like Gang of Four,
The Au Pairs, The Pop Group, and Scritti Politti were my kind of postpunk puritan,
perfect for a young mind that was beginning to approach the world critically.
But there was another kind of puritan around on the early Eighties British
music scene: mod-influenced figures like The Jam’s Paul Weller and Dexy’s
Midnight Runners’s Kevin Rowland. Both made great singles but for some reason I
was never swayed into become a follower of either of these men. I think partly
that’s precisely because they both so clearly wanted converts; each band became
a cause in itself for their following.

Dexys retained and intensified punk’s will-to-power—they
are named after a brand of amphetamine, after all. Rowland’s first response to
punk had been The Killjoys, the name itself indicating a puritanical zeal
seemingly at odds with his Irish Catholic background. Depressed in the aftermath of punk, Rowland rallied
his spirits with the horn-pumping, muscular soul of ‘60s performers like Geno
Washington. This became the template for Dexys’ sound: brassy, uplifting,
pugnacious, and, in its own retro way, as staunch as Gang of Four. Searching
For the Young Rebels, the debut LP, starts with the sounds of a radio: Bursts
of Sex Pistols and The Specials (another politics-in-pop byproduct of punk) are
heard amid the hiss and crackle, before Rowland’s exasperated voice cries, “For
God’s sake, burn it down.” Dexys set themselves up here as both next in a
series of insurgent renewals for British music and as the upstarts who will
surpass their failed precursors. The LP title is an open call for recruits, an
attempt to conjure a new youth movement out of nowhere.

The nature of “young soul rebellion” remained unclear,
though. Political specifics figured here and there. “Dance Stance,” the debut
single, took issue with derogatory stereotypes about the Irish, defiantly
reeling off the nation’s list of illustrious literati. The LP cover featured a
Catholic boy from Ulster being driven from his Belfast home during the
sectarian clearances of 1971; one song concerned Rowland’s unsuccessful attempt
to set up a union at his workplace. But the overriding emphasis was on the
internal politics of the British music scene, on Dexys’ candidacy as a
messianic force, and on Rowland’s belief in, well, belief.

“There There My Dear,” the follow-up hit to the #1
“Geno,” was a paranoid rejoinder to a journalist or musician who refused to
“welcome the new soul vision.” Almost thrown away in the accusatory bluster was
one of political-pop’s most provocative thought-bombs: “The only way to change
things is to shoot men who arrange things.” The implication is that music can
only ever be incidental to the struggle. But given that Rowland and his Dexys
would carry on being pop stars, recording another two more ‘80s albums before
dispersing for a couple of decades, you might well draw a further inference:
They are not really that interested in changing things. That raises the
perturbing possibility: Is pop an arena in which those with the temperament of
revolutionaries can experience all the self-aggrandizing excitement of
leadership, without any of the unglamorous costs or consequences of actual
struggle?

It is almost impossible to convey to young people today
what it was like to grow up during the ‘60s, ‘70s and (first half of) the ‘80s,
with the awareness that nuclear annihilation was a real prospect constantly
hanging over you. One of my high-school projects was a paper on the effects of
a ten megaton bomb dropped on London. Our hometown was about 35 miles from the capital’s
center – the bull’s eye in the target for Soviet bombs - and so it would escape
the fireball and direct blast, but receive some very fierce winds, following by
radioactive fallout. Around this time, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, which was then resurging
after the government’s consent to base U.S.-controlled cruise missiles on
British soil, a decision that would turn the UK into a launch-pad and thus a
prime target for Soviet retaliation—or a preemptive strike.

Pop picked up on these currents of anxiety with a string
of songs about nuclear war. Kate Bush’s disturbing, if overwrought, 1980 single “Breathing” described
“chips of plutonium” penetrating the bloodstream shared by a pregnant mother
and her unborn child. Young Marble Giants’ “Final Day” was a hauntingly still
and soft vignette—somehow more terrifying for its brevity—about our compliance
and complicity in the madness of mutual deterrence. Despite the melodramatic
title, UB40’s hit “The Earth Dies Screaming” was even more chillingly subdued:
its dread bass and funereal pace turned the atmosphere ashen in the Top of
the Pops studio.

A few years later came what was intended as the ultimate
protest record: Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s single “Two Tribes,” a follow-up to
“Relax,” released by the arty-provocateur label ZTT. Lyrically inane and
emotionally ambiguous (at times it
seemed almost to exult in Armageddon, the excitement of living in a world
“where sex and horror are the new gods”), “Two Tribes” nonetheless brought the issue to
the biggest possible audience, colonizing the No. 1 spot on the UK singles
chart for nine weeks during the summer of 1984. The sleeves of its numerous
12-inch mixes resembled my school project, caked in data and diagrams about
what a superpower showdown would entail for short-term lethality and long-term
species-extinction. (A stylish chart totted up the death toll in
categories ranging from nuclear winter and famine to disease and psychological
trauma.) Yet as ZTT’s conceptualist Paul Morley noted wryly, “Two Tribes” was
replaced, after two months atop the charts, by George Michael’s “Careless
Whisper.” Nothing changed, not even in pop, let alone in the outside world.

THE STYLE COUNCIL -
“Shout To The Top”; THE REDSKINS
- “Keep On Keepin On!” b/w ”Reds Strike the Blues!”;THE SMITHS - “Still Ill”; WORLD DOMINATION
ENTERPRISES—“Asbestos Lead Asbestos”; THE MEKONS - “Darkness and Doubt”
(1984-85)

During the 1983 general election, while still a student,
I did some canvassing for the Labour Party: a door-to-door, unswayable voter to
unswayable voter trudge so discouraging it permanently soured me on the
front-line grunt-work that’s the dreary, but indispensable, essence of
political involvement. In the years between Labour’s resounding defeat and the
next election in 1987, a cluster of prominent left-wing musicians—Billy Bragg, Paul
Weller of The Style Council, Jimmy Somerville of the Communards—formed an
organization to mobilise the youth vote: Red Wedge. That name made aesthetes
like me recoil. (Although the phrase’s provenance turned out to be
supercool—the title of a
1919 propaganda poster by Soviet modernist El Lissitzky—it probably
sounded a lot better in Russian).

Me and my kind were also turned off by the
overall aura of well-meaning worthiness that clung to the Red Wedge project,
the demeaning use of music as a mere vehicle. But by this point – I’d started
writing for the UK weekly paper Melody
Maker - I had become persuaded that
politics in pop was a busted flush anyway. To me, the only artistically potent
expressions of the political in late ‘80s music were expressions of impotence:
the flailing rage of World Domination Enterprises; the dissident defiance of
The Smiths; the despondency of The Mekons. (Well, there’s also Public Enemy,
but that’s a whole other knotty story).

Despite Red Wedge’s efforts, the 1987 election was another
resounding defeat for Labour. This served to propel me even further into
blissed-out anti-politics: the most adventurous music then being made, it seemed
to me, hid from the world in gorgeous clouds of noise. Today, grown-up and
worried, I feel retrospective sympathy for Red Wedge and the soul-influenced,
militantly optimistic groups of that time, like The Redskins (aligned with the
Socialist Workers Party rather than Labour). Why was I so down on the idea of
preaching to the converted? When History is against them, the converted need to
have their morale maintained, their spirits kept stalwart.

SPIRAL TRIBE, “Breach the Peace”; “Forward The
Revolution” (1992)

It’s May 1992 and almost by chance I’ve ended up at the
largest public irruption of subcultural dissent the UK has seen since the
concerts and rallies of the punk/Rock Against Racism era: Castlemorton, a mega-rave that takes over an area of unspoiled
and secluded countryside in West England for a full seven days and draws crowds
estimated at around 40,000. Castlemorton is “Anarchy in the U.K.” for real,
what ‘90s theoreticians call a “temporary autonomous zone”: an instant city
formed through the tribal alliance of urban ravers and the post-hippie
travelers who for decades now have driven back and forth across the UK in their
caravans and trucks visiting a summer circuit of free festivals.

I’m only there for the first night—by the time I get back
to London, still blissed and babbling to anyone who’ll listen, Castlemorton is
a front page story in all the papers and the lead item on the TV news.
Questions are asked in Parliament about what should be done to end the menace
of nomadic ravers who could descend in hordes on any genteel village in the
country, inflicting their noise and outlandish dress sense upon the powerless
locals. Rumors abound of hairy, smelly travelers taking a dump in the front
gardens of Castlemorton residents, or trying to sell drugs to local children.

Spiral Tribe, canny media operators
and aspiring martyrs, take all the credit and all the blame. All 13 members of the techno party crew are prosecuted for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,
in a long drawn-out case that will cost the public 4 million pounds but end in acquittal. For the truth is that there were no
ring-leaders behind Castlemorton: its mass confluence was a viral happening, a
swarming that anticipated the flash mobs of digital days to come and that
spiraled way larger than the instigators had anticipated.

In the immediate aftermath of
Castlemorton, while other sound systems -- DiY,
Bedlam, and Circus Warp - shrewdly keep a
low profile, Spiral Tribe do loads of interviews, talking about their aim to
create a “public new sense,” about how days and nights of nonstop drugged
trance-dance can take you outside the limits of reality. The collective are
given a record contract from a label convinced they are techno’s Sex Pistols.
Actually, they’re closer to Genesis
P-Orridge’s Psychic TV: literally a cult group, believers in
conspiracy theories and magical-mystical forces, prophets for a new primitivism
that has paradoxically been enabled by the do-it-yourself autonomy provided by
digital technology.

In addition to the ultimately unsuccessful Spiral Tribe
prosecution, the British government extends the clampdown on illegal raves with
the Criminal Justice and Order Act 1994, which vastly expands police powers to
thwart rave organisers and to make life difficult for squatters and travelers. While
the laws are still working their way through Parliament, their intended victims
organize a protest movement, the Advance Party. This alliance of sound systems and civil liberties campaigners stages a
couple of demonstrations in the summer and fall of 1994. The first, in July, is
one of the few marches I’ve been on in my life. It winds up in Trafalgar
Square, as is traditional for demos in the UK, but everything else about the
protest—the garish, tatterdemalion clothes, the creatively designed placards—is
a wildly different from the drab norms of Left activism.

I’m aware, though,
with every step I take in the midst of this joyous cavalcade, that resistance
is futile. Squatters, ravers, and travelers have few friends in the mainstream
of British life: Ordinary folk are repelled by their appearance and talk, see
them as parasitic layabouts, while figures of influence in politics and the
media know that standing with “the crusties”—as they are popularly
demonized—will do them no favours. The Criminal Justice Bill passes easily;
Spiral Tribe splinter, with one faction moving to Europe to spread the
“teknival” concept across the Continent.

Like the Sex
Pistols, Castlemorton proved once again the extraordinary power of music to
upset and disturb; how noise and words can shake reality, momentarily upturning
common-sense ideas of what’s normal and proper and possible. But it also showed
once again the limitations of that power in the face of the forces that control
the world. The idea of changing things through music is
arguably a useful illusion, creating an urgent sense of mission and high stakes
that again and again results in inspirational sounds and statements. But it
could also be seen, more severely, as a diversion from the dirty, dreary work
of struggle.